In a typical large scale organization, the competitive pressures, customer expectations and compliance with regulations drive the ever increasing need for the enterprise to become more agile, flexible and dynamic when it comes to automated systems and information technology (IT). To address these needs, service oriented architectures (SOA) have recently surfaced and transformed how such organizations integrate and connect to information systems. For example, SOA has come a long way in providing a unified way for applications to interact with each other and to expose functionality as services using industry standards. Today, many enterprises are implementing SOA to reduce the costs of integration and to attain more rapid development cycles.
However, SOA initiatives have been mostly focused on efficiency and adaptability in IT. In order to truly realize the business value of SOA a somewhat different approach is desirable, one that is focused on the various business processes of an organization and one that allows IT to be seamlessly integrated into these business processes, empowering collaboration between business and IT.
In recent years, business process management (BPM) software systems have become more and more widely used among various organizations. For a typical business enterprise, it is usually desirable to integrate all of its data and processes into a single and unified system. For example, an organization may automate a business process by having a computer perform certain activities of the business, such as receiving a sales order, sending a notification to a client, or reminding a human participant of work that needs to be performed.
While automation of such business processes has posed a number of difficulties, software BPM systems have become ever increasingly important solutions to many organizations. By implementing software BPM suites, enterprises are becoming more and more able to increase productivity, performance, profits and decrease inefficiency due to various factors. Nevertheless, a multitude of inefficiencies and problems remain in the BPM software world. The lack of seamless access to the various processes from virtually any device and deficiencies in integration with such devices have surfaced as possible areas of improvement. In addition, the lack of process intelligence able to support such functionality has been an issue. Applicants have identified the foregoing, as well as other needs, which currently exist in the art, in coming to conceive the subject matter of the present disclosure.